As I learn more about the beings of this planet , I realize there is no
difference between the human and the insect. The only difference is
perhaps our destructiveness. Here is another example of our similarity.
While countries waste time on making laws on ridiculous issues
like abortion and homosexuality, the rest of the animal world takes
these issues as natural. University of Oslo ’s Natural History Museum in
Norway has put up a first-ever museum display “Against Nature?,” which
presents 51 species of animals exhibiting homosexuality.

Homosexuality is defined as sex between two or more members of the same
sex in the same species. Dragonflies, spiders, crabs, shellfish,
gutworms, bats, whales and dolphins far from being unnatural,
homosexuality is a normal part of the animal world. “Homosexuality” and
“heterosexuality” are terms defined by human societies. These boundaries
are invisible in the animal kingdom. Homosexual and bisexual animals,
range from mountain gorillas to cats, dogs and guinea pigs. The animal
kingdom rejoices in all kinds of lifestyles.
Studies of animal homosexuality are centuries old. In 1896, French
entomologist Henri Gadeau de Kerville published a drawing of two male
scarab beetles copulating.

In the early 1900s, investigators
described homosexual behavior in baboons, salmon, garter snakes and
gentoo penguins. In 1914 Gilbert Hamilton reported in the Journal of
Animal Behavior that same-sex behavior in Japanese macaques and baboons
occurred largely as a way of making peace with would-be foes. He wrote
“homosexual alliances between mature and immature males insure the
assistance of an adult defender in the event of an attack.”How similar
to the “insurance” bonding of humans in jail ! In 1999 Bruce Bagemihl, a
biologist at the University of Wisconsin , published a book.

Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity.
Bagemihl found that homosexuality had been documented in 1,500 species.
T he earliest mention of animal homosexuality probably came 2,300 years
ago when Aristotle described two female hyenas cavorting with each
other. Not only does homosexual behavior exist in nearly every species
(as demonstrated by thousands of studies beginning with Konrad Lorenz,
the father of modern zoology) but as one goes up the evolutionary ladder
from insects to humans, homosexual activity increases in frequency .Roy
and Silo, two male chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo in
Manhattan are inseparable. They entwine their necks, vocalize to each
other, they have sex.

Last survivor of ‘unsinkable’ Titanic dies
at 97 05.31.09 When offered female companionship, they have adamantly
refused . The females aren’t interested in them, either. At one time,
the two were so desperate to incubate an egg together that they put a
rock in their nest and sat on it, keeping it warm with their abdomens.
Finally, the keeper gave them a fertile egg to hatch. A chick, Tango,
was born. They raised Tango, keeping her warm and feeding her until she
could go out into the world on her own.A pair
of gay vultures at the Jerusalem Zoo have shown the world just how
caring gay adoptive parents can be. Israeli zoologist Shmuel Yidov
slipped a day-old vulture chick into their nest.

The two fathers
reared the baby. They shaded him , brought him water from a pond, fed
him, stopped him falling from the nest. Biology professor Joan
Roughgarden at Stanford University , in her book “Evolution’s Rainbow”
says, mating isn’t only about multiplying. Like humans, animals have sex
just for fun or love or to cement their social bonds. Some female
grizzly bears form partnerships, travel together, defend each other,
raise cubs together and putting off hibernation in an attempt to stay
together longer.

Scientists have found homosexual behavior
throughout the animal world. Same sex pairs of animals kiss and caress
each other with obvious tenderness. Male pairs and female pairs form
long-lasting pair-bonds and even fight off potential opposite sex
partners when they appear. Members of the pair show distress at being
separated from their partners and joy when reunited. Even when they lose
their same sex partner, white-fronted Amazon parrots will not revert. So
will gay Long-eared hedgehogs, Stellar’s sea eagles and barn owls,.
Swans are the symbols of eternal romantic love. But one fifth of the
couples are all male or all female. Male couples mate with a female just
to have a baby. Once she lays the egg, they chase her away, hatch the
egg, and raise a family on their own. Sometimes they steal the eggs and
become model parents.

Male flamingoes and other birds will have
one-night stands with females to produce eggs, then chase off the mother
and rear the offspring with another male. 12% of roseate tern couples
are female-female pairs who fertilize their eggs through a quick fling
with males, and then remain faithful to each other for years. Five
percent of geese and duck couples do the same. Single females will lay
eggs in a homosexual pair’s nest. In a colony of black-headed gulls,
every tenth pair is lesbian. 15 percent of female western gulls are gay.

They woo each other with gifts of food and form bonds that last for
years. They build joint nests. Occasionally, one or both females will
mate with males, but they always raise their young together. Two percent
of male ostriches ignore females and court males with a dance that
involves running toward the chosen partner, skidding to a stop in front
of him, pirouetting, crouching, rocking, fluffing feathers, puffing
their throats and twisting their necks like a corkscrew. Male giraffes
spend most of their time in bachelor groups, where they entwine necks
and rub against each other for hours at a time. These “necking” sessions
often culminate in mounting. Homosexuality is
common among young male dolphin calves.

According to researchers, since male-male cooperation is extremely
important for adult survival, the homosexual behavior of the young
calves could be aimed at establishing lifelong bonds. Male walruses,
often form homosexual pair bonds and have sex with each other outside of
the breeding season, but will revert to a heterosexual pattern during
the normal breeding season..

Male big horn sheep live in
“homosexual societies.” If a male sheep chooses to not have gay sex, he
becomes a social outcast ! The male and female bighorn sheep unite
during the rutting season, but the rest of the year the males stick
together. The more social the species, the more likely it is to engage
in homosexual activity, the exhibition argues. “Many social animals have
complex social systems where individuals seek out allies for help and
protection. Sex is an important way of strengthening the alliance.” In
fact, advanced animal communities, which require communal bonds in order
to function are more likely to have homosexuality intermixed with
heterosexuality. Japanese Macaque society revolves around females, who
dominate the group. Males come and go. To help maintain the necessary
social networks, female macaques are lesbian.

These friendly
copulations, form the bedrock of macaque society, preventing unnecessary
violence and aggression. In fact females will choose to mate with
another female, as opposed to a male, 92.5% of the time. Bonobos, dwarf
chimpanzees, engage in sexual behavior to ease social tensions and avoid
conflict. For instance, if two bonobos approach a box thrown into their
enclosure, they will mount each other before playing with the box.

Such situations lead to squabbles in most other species. But bonobos
use sex to diffuse tension. In Bonobo: The
Forgotten Ape, primatologist Frans de Waal writes that he has observed
hundreds of such incidents, suggesting that these homosexual acts may be
a general peacekeeping strategy. “The more homosexuality, the more
peaceful the species,” asserts Petter Bckman of the University of Oslo’s
Museum of Natural History Other animals mount animals of the same sex
but their motivation may differ.

Dogs usually do so to express
dominance. Domesticated cattle mount each other as stress relieving
behaviour. Male lions often band together with their brothers to lead
the pride. To ensure loyalty, they strengthen the bonds by having sex
with each other. A statement in the exhibition says, “ One thing is
clear -- homosexuality is found throughout the animal kingdom, it is not
against nature.”

Real difference between a man and any animal

By: Maneka Gandhi

Article published on 7/6/2009 11:52:37 PM IST

What is the real difference between a man and any animal or insect? Let
this article explain to you; A book called Elephants on Acid, Bizarre
Experiments by Alex Boise is a collection of experiments which the
writer finds weird. While most of them are very sad – killing hundreds
of dogs to see whether any dog can live with two heads, two of the
experiments should open your eyes to the nature of the human being.

What causes the human to be either good or evil? What causes man to
become aggressive, rude, antisocial and cruel? It is not chemical
imbalance. Or vitamin deficiency. Scientists show that all it needs is
to place the person in the right situation. According to Philip Zimbardo
“Any deed that any human being has ever done, however horrible, is
possible for any of us to do – under the right or wrong situational
pressures”

Are you capable of killing someone on the command of a
stranger. Of course not, you say. But experiments done at Yale
University in the early 1960s show that anyone can and will do terrible
things especially if they believe that the order is in the interests of
“science” or that someone else is going to take responsibility for their
act.

The researcher Stanley Milgram, wanted to find out whether
Americans would kill thousands of people in the way Germans had killed
Jews. So he set up an experiment in which randomly chosen ordinary
people, postal workers, teachers, salesman, factory hands, were asked to
commit acts of cruelty by an authority figure. No one would force them.
They could leave when they wanted. Only verbal commands like “please go
on … please continue with the experiment…” would be given. They would
not be paid or pushed in any way. The ad asked for volunteers in an
experiment to study “memory and learning”.

The volunteer was met
by an actor playing the role of a white coated “researcher” and another
who pretended to be the “learner”.

The volunteer was told that the
experiment was designed to examine the effect of punishment on learning.
As teacher, he would read out words to the learner and then ask him to
repeat them. Each time the learner gave a wrong answer, the teacher had
to press a button on a machine to give him an electric shock. The shocks
would increase in intensity. The researcher pretended to strap the
learner into an electric chair and the supposedly nervous learner told
the researcher that he had a heart condition. The teacher was taken into
another room where he could not see the learner again and given the
voltage switch.

The first few times the learner got the words
right but as he made mistakes, the teacher pressed the switch. When he
passed the 75 volt level, the learner started moaning. At 120 the
learner shouted and by 150 volts he started screaming. (All this was
actually being done from a tape recorder.) The teachers, in most cases,
began to sweat and tremble and all of them looked at the researcher for
guidance. All he would ask was for them to go on for the sake of the
experiment.

Milgram had forecast that no one would proceed
beyond this point. But none of the volunteers backed off. They kept
pressing the switch as the voltage got higher and higher and the
agonized screams got louder and louder– all the way up to 450 volts when
the screams fell silent as the learner was either unconscious or dead.

Milgram conceded “I would say , on the basis of having observed a
thousand people in the experiment that if a system of death camps were
set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany one
would be able to find sufficient personnel for those camps in any
American town.”

Milgram tried out hundreds of variations of the
experiment and found that as long as the volunteer did not see or hear
from the victim, he was totally obedient no matter what the cruelty
level was. Even if he saw and heard the pain, it was still 65%. And when
he had to physically press the victim’s hand on a metal plate to give
him a shock, 30% still did it. Women were just as pliable as men.

This experiment has been duplicated hundreds of times in different
countries. The result is always the same.

Another experiment done
by Charles Sheridan and Richard King used a puppy in a box. The
researcher was told to shock the puppy if it stood in the wrong place –
as it was being trained. In fact there was no right place. The
volunteers kept shocking the puppy till it howled and jumped up and down
and then collapsed. The volunteers cried, they hyperventilated, they
screamed - but all of them kept shocking the puppy till it died. Another
researcher did an experiment in “obedience” involving “normal” people
who were told that they were part of blood pressure experiments. Live
white rats were put on their hands and they were told to decapitate
them. The men swore, the women cried. But since they had been “ordered
“75% of the volunteers decapitated the rats while they were squirming in
their palms by stabbing and sawing away at them.

Contrast this
with a study done in Chicago . Researchers locked rhesus monkeys into
cages. To get food they had to pull a chain. But if the monkey pulled
the chain, his neighbour got an electric shock. After seeing the
agony of their neighbours, all the monkeys refused to pull the chain.
Some went hungry for as long as 12 days before they died, instead of
inflicting pain on one of their own kind. Whenever this experiment has
been repeated – from apes to rats and cockroaches, all of them have
reacted like this. They would rather die than cause wanton pain.